Inside the Routine, There Is Still Room to Play

I had reservations about this topic before we started.

Creative play in daily life.

For some people, maybe this sounds easy. For me, not really. I can talk about customers. I can talk about football. I can talk about family, driving, meetings, distributors, sales numbers, and how to build a relationship step by step. These are my worlds. These are practical things. But creative play in daily life sounded, in the beginning, a little bit too abstract for me.

It was not in my comfort zone.

So I had to trust The Mayor.

I had to trust that he would find the right angle, because normally he does. He asks simple questions, but then suddenly I see something in my own life that I did not see before. At first, I think, “What has this to do with me?” And then, after some minutes, I am already telling a story.

That is how it started.

He asked me about a normal day, Monday to Friday. Not a special day. Not a trade fair day. Not a football day. Just a normal day at home.

And I told him the truth: I wake up and I am not yet really there.

Some people open their eyes and they are ready for the world. Julia is more like this. She can wake up and talk. She can start the day with words already in her head. I need more time. I need the first half hour, maybe one hour, before I am really human.

First, I check my smartphone while I am still lying in bed. WhatsApp, social media, messages. It is not that life stops without the phone. Life continues, of course. But it is my first routine. The smartphone sleeps in the bedroom, and in the morning it is almost the first small connection to the world.

Then I go to the bathroom. I make myself fresh. After that, I go downstairs to the kitchen and press the power button on the coffee machine. This is important. Coffee first. Then, if Julia needs help with Jaron, I help her. When they leave for the Petit, I go upstairs to my office, close the door, and start to work.

But before 8:30, I am not really a man for Teams calls. If a colleague calls too early, normally I do not answer. I know this about myself. In the morning I can be a little bit grumpy. I do not want to talk with everybody. Julia knows this after three years. She respects it. She talks only about the essential things: good morning, what is needed, and then she leaves me a little bit alone.

With our son, it is different. He is still too young to know if he is a morning person or not. Today I woke up at 6:30. I did my morning routine: bathroom, kitchen, coffee, upstairs to the office. At 7:15 I heard very fast footsteps. Then the office door opened and he stood there in front of me. Maybe he likes the risk. Maybe he thinks, “Let’s annoy Daddy.” But it was okay, because I already had forty-five minutes to wake up.

I can hide my morning mood very well for him. I think he does not know. I try not to be grumpy with him. It is hard sometimes, but I can overplay it. Maybe this is also part of being a father. You learn where your own mood ends and where the small person in front of you begins.

The Mayor asked me about creative play, and at first I still thought, “This is not so easy.” Because when I hear the word play, I think about football. Football training. Matches. The team. The result of the last match. But life is not only games on the field. Maybe play is also in the small routines. Maybe play is in how we talk with people, how we open a conversation, how we make the day a little lighter.

Every Monday evening, normally, I have Stammtisch. We have a WhatsApp group, and every Monday people write who has time, when we meet, and where. We go to the same bar. I think we are the oldest Stammtisch there, or at least the group with the longest relationship to this bar. We even have our Stammtisch sign.

This gives stability. The bar can calculate with us. Monday evening, our table, our people. But we are open too. If someone comes in, even a tourist, and sits with us, I think that is no problem. We are open to talk with new people. It is not normal that we invite new people every week, but if someone comes, we do not throw him out. Maybe this is also play: the stable table, the known faces, and then sometimes a new person with a new story.

In work, play is more clear for me.

When I prepare for a customer meeting, single steps feel like a game. I know the customer, I know the sales, but when I prepare, I go deeper. I look at the product sales, the quantities, the development. If the development is good, I win the first game. If the development is not good, then I lose the first game, and I must understand why.

Then I create ideas. What topics can I discuss with this customer? What is the special point? Maybe I want to update all products from us. I know this is not always easy to install at the customer. Then it becomes the next game. How can I win this topic? How can I open the door?

For me, the most important thing in every discussion is to find the opener.

I saw this again at the trade fair in Stuttgart. I was there at the weekend, at the Select Congress. There were distributors from us and customers too. My idea was clear: I needed to speak with as many people as possible and exchange contact data. With every person, I needed a new opener, because not every opener works for every person.

Sometimes it is spontaneous. I saw the company Leise there. I had no contact with them before. Then I said that my predecessor could not be there because he is retired. That was the opener. A person from Leise came into the group, and we talked about him, about holidays, about how they know him, about what they do. I thought, “Okay, this is the way.” From one small sentence, a new contact started.

This is not manipulation. I do not like that. It is more like listening. You wait for the small detail where the door opens a little bit. Then you ask the right question. You find out how the person ticks. Maybe the chemistry is perfect, maybe not. But in most situations, you can find a way to work together.

That is different from my first job. In the past, it was more like I had to build the relationship only to get the first sale. And even when I grew the sale, another person could come in tomorrow with the same products and take it away. There was not really the together feeling.

Now, with my company, it is different. My customer wants to grow, and we want to grow. This makes the work more cooperation. We have strong partners. We work many years together. It is more together. The game is not only me against him. It is more like we stand on the same side and look at the same goal.

The Mayor liked this sentence. He stopped there, because he saw something for his own work. He said that when the customer wants to grow and he wants to grow, selling changes. It is not only selling a service. It is creating something that helps both sides. I think this is right. When both grow, the routine becomes more playful, because it has energy.

Driving is another part of my life, but maybe I am less playful there.

When I drove to Stuttgart, I called colleagues and old colleagues. Not only to work, more to maintain contact. On Sunday, driving home, I listened to Radio Schlagerparadies. The Mayor told me about games he played on long drives with his wife. They counted red Norbert trucks. They looked for yellow cars. He asked if I could do something like this.

For me, no. I am a relaxed driver. I do not want to look for yellow cars or special trucks. I want to listen to music or a podcast and relax. Maybe next time my company gives me a self-driving car, then I can relax one hundred percent. When nobody else is in the car and it is a good song, then yes, I sing with the radio. But looking for trucks? No.

In the evening, my play is smaller. Jaron has his own mind. Normally we go to bed, he drinks his bottle with milk, then we cuddle. After twenty minutes, sometimes after one hour and thirty minutes, he falls asleep. Sometimes I fall asleep too. Normally I stay awake and go back to the living room. Then I watch my series.

At the moment it is The Rookie. I am normally not the biggest fan of series, but now I watch this. It is about a police department in the US, one group, how they work, and there is also a love story in the team. It is entertainment, but also interesting. I look at how police officers work in the US and how different it is from Germany. Of course, you cannot really compare Los Angeles and Weiden. It is a little bit different.

At the end, The Mayor gave me a small mission for the day. He said maybe I could notice one beautiful detail, ask one unusual question, play one favorite song before the first meeting, or make one customer smile.

For me, this was easy.

Make one customer smile.

That is the best tool. When a customer smiles, the relationship becomes warmer. The room changes. You feel if the person opens. You feel if trust can grow. A smile is small, but it is not nothing. It can be the first step to a better conversation.

And then I noticed that The Mayor had done exactly what I had trusted him to do.

He found the angle.

At the beginning, creative play was not my topic. It felt too soft, maybe too far away from my normal words. But through the questions, it became my life. It became my morning routine, my coffee, my son running into my office, my Stammtisch, my customer meetings, my drive to Stuttgart, my music, my series, and the small mission to make a customer smile.

Maybe creative play is not always a game. Maybe it is not always football, or yellow cars, or something funny on the road. Maybe it is the way I prepare a meeting like a match. Maybe it is the way I find an opener with a new person. Maybe it is the way I try to hide my morning mood for my son. Maybe it is the Stammtisch table, always the same, but still open for someone new.

I think life needs routine. Without routine, everything becomes too much. But inside the routine, there are small spaces where something can happen. A question. A smile. A song in the car. A child running into the office at 7:15.

And maybe this is enough play for one normal day.